September 21, 2004
Hitchhiker’s Guide Taken Over
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the interactive fiction, by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky), as promised, has been re-implemented and (partially) illustrated and is now available online. It’s quite fascinating to see the first release of the new edition, not only because it demonstrates the continued vitality of 20-year-old IF, but also because I’m in the middle of a similar project. Here’s information on playing the new HHGTTG, on the making of the new edition, on how to submit illustrations that they may use to expand the edition, and on the making of the original 1984 Infocom interactive fiction. The last page links to a video clip of Adams discussing the game. As Richard Harris writes there, “There was a time when computer games didn’t have graphics. … Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together – the point’n’click game.”
Update, 9:45 pm: Evin Robertson posts on rec.games.int-fiction that the BBC “are running the original Infocom game through a modified interpreter running on their server. The server communicates to the flash interface using some XML,” with ID numbers that tag items in inventory, locations, and the like. This is a clever way to: (1) ensure the original text exchange is maintained exactly, (2) enable a new illustrated interface, and (3) prevent people from downloading their own copy of the game, which resides on the server. Google Groups took many hours to show the new newsgroup posts, but here it is.
October 8th, 2004 at 6:48 am
i am in the opinion of the fact that opposible thumbs cannot be in this game. However it cannot be stated that as a matter of fact it is not always irregular to be in proportion of the generic terms of the apropriate game in question. The seismic proportions of the end result of this particular pro magnon man should not be underestimated. As we go fourth into this new millenia we must all take into account the actions of deterministic and non-linear overkill hypothesis.